American philosophy
A small number of philosophies are known as American in origin, namely pragmatism and transcendentalism, with their most prominent proponents being the philosophers William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson respectively.
[2] Documents such as the Mayflower Compact (1620), followed by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), made manifest basic socio-political positions, which served as foundations for the newly established communities.
[5] They were used "in the tumultuous years of the 1750s and 1770s" to "forge a new intellectual culture for the United states",[6] which led to the American incarnation of the European Enlightenment that is associated with the political thought of the Founding Fathers.
[7] The first 100 years or so of college education in the American Colonies were dominated in New England by the Puritan theology of William Ames and "the sixteenth-century logical methods of Petrus Ramus.
[9] They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare",[9] and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard colleges.
They were first opened and studied by an eighteen-year-old graduate student from Guilford, Connecticut, the young American Samuel Johnson, who had also just found and read Lord Francis Bacon's 1605 book Advancement of Learning.
According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating faith lead to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune.
While the 17th- and early 18th-century American philosophical tradition was decidedly marked by religious themes and the Reformation reason of Ramus, the 18th century saw more reliance on science and the new learning of the Age of Enlightenment, along with an idealist belief in the perfectibility of human beings through teaching ethics and moral philosophy, laissez-faire economics, and a new focus on political matters.
Johnson strongly rejected Calvin's doctrine of Predestination and believed that people were autonomous moral agents endowed with freewill and Lockean natural rights.
[25] Although the Declaration of Independence does contain references to the Creator, the God of Nature, Divine Providence, and the Supreme Judge of the World, the Founding Fathers were not exclusively theistic.
Some professed personal concepts of deism, as was characteristic of other European Enlightenment thinkers, such as Maximilien Robespierre, François-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen name, Voltaire), and Rousseau.
[41] While Scottish innate sense realism would in the decades after the Revolution become the dominant moral philosophy in classrooms of American academia for almost 100 years,[42] it was not a strong influence at the time of the Declaration was crafted.
[44] Thomas Paine, the English intellectual, pamphleteer, and revolutionary who wrote Common Sense and Rights of Man was an influential promoter of Enlightenment political ideas in America, though he was not a philosopher.
Common Sense, which has been described as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era",[45] provides justification for the American revolution and independence from the British Crown.
"[46] In summary, "in the middle eighteenth century," it was "the collegians who studied" the ideas of the new learning and moral philosophy taught in the Colonial colleges who "created new documents of American nationhood.
Transcendentalism in the United States was marked by an emphasis on subjective experience, and can be viewed as a reaction against modernism and intellectualism in general and the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview in particular.
Sumner, much influenced by Spencer, believed along with the industrialist Andrew Carnegie that the social implication of the fact of the struggle for survival is that laissez-faire capitalism is the natural political-economic system and is the one that will lead to the greatest amount of well-being.
[56] Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, though he himself was a mathematician of logic and a founder of statistics.
Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, both fallibilism and anti-skeptical belief that truth is discoverable and immutable, logic as formal semiotic (including semiotic elements and classes of signs, modes of inference, and methods of inquiry along with pragmatism and critical common-sensism), Scholastic realism, theism, objective idealism, and belief in the reality of continuity of space, time, and law, and in the reality of absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos and as modes of its evolution.
[60] John Dewey (1859–1952), while still engaging in the lofty academic philosophical work of James and Peirce before him, also wrote extensively on political and social matters, and his presence in the public sphere was much greater than his pragmatist predecessors.
In addition to being one of the founding members of pragmatism, John Dewey was one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading figure of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
Du Bois (1868–1963), trained as a historian and sociologist, and described as a pragmatist like his professor William James, pioneered a shift in philosophy away from abstraction and toward engaged social criticism.
Santayana was accompanied in the intellectual climate of 'common sense' philosophy by the thinkers of the New Realism movement,[66] such as Ralph Barton Perry, who criticized idealism as exhibiting what he called the egocentric predicament.
Ayn Rand, who claimed Aristotle as her primary philosophical influence, promoted ethical egoism (the praxis of the belief system she called Objectivism) in her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).
These two novels gave birth to the Objectivist movement and would influence a small group of students called The Collective, one of whom was a young Alan Greenspan, a self-described libertarian who would become Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
[72] Some academic philosophers have been highly critical of the quality and intellectual rigor of Rand's work,[73][74] but she remains a popular, albeit controversial, figure within American culture.
With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, many positivists fled Germany to Britain and America, and this helped reinforce the dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States in subsequent years.
[83] Critical theory was rooted in the Western European Marxist philosophical tradition and sought philosophy that was "practical" and not merely "theoretical", that would help not only to understand the world but to shape it—generally toward human emancipation and freedom from domination.
[91] American philosophers and writers who have engaged with critical theory include Angela Davis,[92] Edward Said,[93] Martha Nussbaum,[94] bell hooks,[95] Cornel West,[96] and Judith Butler.
"[101] Nozick asserts his view of the entitlement theory of justice, which says that if everyone in society has acquired his or her holdings in accordance with the principles of acquisition, transfer, and rectification, then any pattern of allocation, no matter how unequal the distribution may be, is just.
